Man Makes Over $100,000 Selling Postcards Inked With his Thumbprint

Man Makes Over $100,000 Selling Postcards Inked With his Thumbprint

The internet has an interesting way of turning outright wacky business ideas into international phenomena.

In 2005, there was milliondollarhomepage.com, where a then 21-year-old Alex Tew made over a million dollars selling pixels on his site in exchange for ‘a piece of internet history’. Six years later in 2011, web developer Steve Gadlin started charging customers online $9.95 for a custom drawn cat and sold 18,794 original works of art. More recently in 2015, a 24-year-old man named Alex Craig started a web business to send potatoes etched with personalized messages. It went to make consistent $10,000 months and the business was eventually sold for $85,000. Both Steve and Alex Craig have also appeared in the highly popular reality television series Shark Tank.

The year 2016 managed to squeeze yet another wild internet business sensation in literally the last days of the calendar. A man named Richard Tham has created richardtham.com, a site where he sells postcards inked with his thumbprints and his customers’ messages. Leveraging on the fact that his ‘thumbprint postcards’ are limited in stock and impossible to replicate, he went on to make an impressive $100,000 in a short span of one month, with customers and fans believing that the value of his postcards would appreciate.

Pic: One of Richard’s ‘million dollar thumbprint postcard’.

On his site, he wrote,

“Because there are only a million pieces of my thumbprint postcards available, people actually started believing that once my time on Earth is over, there will be no way to duplicate any of those original postcards, given the same technological outlook. A thumbprint is hard to forge. And some among the one million pieces will be destroyed. Some stashed away and lost forever. Supposedly the value of my cards will only increase.”

Richard initially started his site as a joke. Now, he runs it full time.

“What started out as a joke has turned into a full time career for me,” he says.

He also calls his postcards “Uncle Richard’s Million Dollar Postcards”.

Pic: Another one of Richard’s postcards with his thumbprint and his client’s message.

Given the rate he is going, he might just be able to sell a million pieces of his postcards. That would amount to an astounding gross total of twenty million dollars.